Gina Davidson, winner of the Gender Equality in Political Reporting Award for her “Let’s hear it for the smart girls” article published in the Edinburgh Evening News

Over the festive break, we’ll be sharing reflections from each of our 2015 Write to End Violence Against Women Awards winners which were originally published in the National Newspaper on 11 December 2015.

BACK in 1992 when the Zero Tolerance campaign launched in Edinburgh and was considered controversial for putting the issue of domestic abuse on the flagpoles of Princes Street and on the sides of Lothian buses, I was just starting out on my career in journalism.

Covering “women’s issues” wasn’t even a consideration – I just wanted to tell people’s stories and uncover wrongs in society; to get an exclusive.

It turns out that the stories which I’ve told, the wrongs which I’ve “uncovered” have too often involved women – too many women – who have suffered domestic assault, violence, rape and other physical and mental abuses.

You run campaigns for organisations like Women’s Aid, you write editorials welcoming new policies in tackling domestic abuse, you search for ever more powerful testimony from women whose lives are shattered, and yet you can be left wondering if any of it has impact.

That’s why the Write to End Violence Against Women awards are important. They are a recognition that newspaper journalists are trying to get to the heart of an issue which shames Scotland – as well as being a conscience to a media which can still be inherently sexist.